From the Garden to the Plate
I cook dinner day in and day out. Most of my meals are of the one dish variety, and I always double the recipe.
In cooler weather I make soups. Monday’s pot of vegetable soup will be reheated for dinner again on Tuesday when it will taste even better.
On Wednesday I might fix a pot of pinto beans, unless I’m in the mood to make a pan of enchiladas, or a pot of chili.
Bean dishes and soups are my specialty, along with salads. Often I put every kind of vegetable into my salads, just like I do my vegetable soups.
My husband’s love of gardening provides us with homegrown vegetables and herbs. He plants, and I tend the rows. Tomatoes, basil and serrano peppers are abundant now. Earlier in the month we had a good zucchini harvest, along with plenty of fresh squash blossoms. Golden yellow and extremely fragile, the blossoms are picked early in the morning before they open and need to be used the same day. There is nothing finer than batter-fried squash blossoms and Salsa Fresca made from homegrown tomatoes.
On weekends my angler husband cooks the fish he catches from the ocean to pair with my salad. His fresh catch, and perfected fish recipes are better than any of the rave restaurants in town. Back when my son was growing up he took on the dessert challenge, producing perfect chocolate chip cookies. And my youngest daughter, who couldn’t be bothered with cooking as a child or teenager, grew up to be an especially good cook as an adult. Yet around here, I am the one who responds to the task of getting a work-a-day dinner on the table Monday through Friday.
When you write, you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner’s pick, a wood-carver’s gouge, a surgeon’s probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory. Is it a dead end, or have you located the real subject? You will know tomorrow, or this time next year. —Annie Dillard
We Who Walk the Seven Ways is Terra Trevor’s memoir about seeking healing and finding belonging. After she endured a difficult loss, a circle of Native women elders embraced and guided Trevor (mixed-blood Cherokee, Lenape, Seneca, and German) through the seven cycles of life in Indigenous ways. Over three decades, these women lifted her from grief, instructed her in living, and showed her how to age from youth into beauty.
With tender honesty, Trevor explores how every ending is always a beginning. Her reflections on the deep power of women’s friendship, losing a child, reconciling complicated roots, and finding richness in every stage of life show that being an American Indian with a complex lineage is not about being part something, but about being part of something.
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“Terra Trevor’s memoir is a gentle invitation to journey with her across decades, an invitation to notice with her as she seeks healing and finds belonging. There were phrases and sentences I underlined, places where I wept, passages that will remain with me as they drew me to insights I’d previously struggled to name. I closed the final pages and knew that in reading this book, I had been the recipient of a generous and much-needed gift. While I can certainly finish a book in a day, I chose to move slowly through this one, letting each idea, each paragraph, each reflection gently spill over me, allowing the pages to alter me in some way.” —Patrice Gopo, author of Autumn Song: Essays on Absence
"Terra Trevor’s Pushing up the Sky is a revelation of the struggles and triumphs packed into the hyphens between Korean and Native American and American. From her, we learn that adoption can best be mutual, that the adoptive parent needs acculturation in the child’s ways. With unflinching honesty and unfailing love, Trevor details the risks and heartaches of taking in, the bittersweetness of letting go, and the everlasting bonds that grow between them all. With ‘Pushing up the Sky’, the ‘literature of adoption’ comes of age as literature, worthy of an honored place in the human story." —Robert Bensen, editor of Children of the Dragonfly: Native American Voices on Child Custody and Education
